The Messy Reality of Canada’s Urban Growth
Growing up in the U.K., Geoffrey James never dreamed he’d live in Canada one day. “The country wasn’t on my radar,” he says. After graduating from Oxford in 1964, he took a reporting job in Philadelphia, where he picked up photography as a hobby. Two years later, he moved to Montreal, and his perception of Canada flipped. The city was electric in the lead-up to Expo 67, and James found himself chatting with cultural icons like Mordecai Richler, Robertson Davies and Arthur Erickson. On staff for Time’s Canada edition, he wrote cover stories about the 1972 Summit Series and Quebec’s October Crisis. His passion for photography deepened, too—he shot a portrait of painter Alex Colville, which later appeared on a postage stamp, and taught the history of photography at Concordia University. In 1982, at 40 years old, he devoted himself to photography full-time.
Over the next four decades, James became a prolific photographer and author. He’s had shows at MoMA, the Palazzo Braschi in Rome and the Americas Society in New York, and he’s published books on the changing landscapes of Lethbridge, the now-defunct Kingston Penitentiary and abandoned asbestos mines in Quebec. In 2012, he earned a Governor General’s Award for his contributions to photography.
James’s latest body of work began in 2010, during a trip to Sudbury for a cities symposium. One day, he broke free from the day’s events to walk around the city in search of scenes to shoot. He was drawn to the abandoned mines and the towering Inco Superstack. Sudbury, with its rough-and-tumble charm, became a captivating subject for James. For the next 13 years, he continued in that vein, taking photos that showcased the unvarnished Canada he saw every day: street corners, scrappy shops and construction sites. “I wanted to capture the Canada that didn’t have to do with the CN Tower or Lake Louise, but rather how we live and interact with the land,” he says. From those years of documentation came his new book, Canadian Photographs, a candid record of our land in rapid development.
James borrowed the title from American Photographs by Walker Evans, an eclectic photo book that captured the varied walks of American life. But Canadian Photographs is undeniably its own work—not a geographic volume or a treatise on identity, but rather a snapshot of a country in flux. From the streets of Montreal, the Fraser Valley, the village of Quyon in Quebec and many other places, it shows how Canada grapples with the challenges of urban growth. There are images of cities bogged down in construction and scrambling to adapt to population booms, dusty and abandoned gentrification projects, and small storefronts from bygone eras fighting to stay alive in downtown Toronto. Below, he shares the stories behind some photos from the book.
Calgary, Alberta (2015): “I was wandering downtown and kept thinking, Who designed this place? Calgary is an economic boomtown, but it’s bisected by bulky railroad tracks and suburbs that clumsily back into the foothills. The city feels like a jumble of collages stuck together.”
Madoc, Ontario (2010): “Every time I drove from our home in Toronto to our cottage on Île du Grand Calumet, a small island on the Ottawa River, I’d stop at a berry stand in Madoc, a quiet town just off Highway 7. Now, this photo is an artifact: the berry stand is long gone, replaced by a McDonald’s that forced it to close.”
Toronto, Ontario (2018): “Shopping at Honest Ed’s made me nervous—I’d get lost, and many of its products seemed like fire hazards. But I loved the funhouse mirrors. When I took this photo, Honest Ed’s had been closed for two years. That area is now rampant with condo buildings.”
Copper Cliff, Ontario (2012): “These houses are part of a dense, mostly Italian community near Sudbury. Many of the residents came to work in the mines and settled here in Copper Cliff. They’re also near the 381-metre Inco Superstack, the second-tallest chimney in the world.”
Washago, Ontario (2019): “I was on a train through Washago and spotted a cinematic scene: a boy with a tote bag and a girl holding what seemed like pet food, standing on opposite sides of the road. Using a 2/1000 shutter speed, I stuck my camera to the train window and captured this.”
Downsview, Ontario (2018): “In 1999, architects Rem Koolhaas and Bruce Mau won the bid to turn Downsview into a world-class urban park. But bureaucratic inertia halted the project. This was all that was left six years ago.”
Toronto, Ontario (2015): “This convenience store at Ossington and Dupont was just five minutes from my old house. I never shopped there, but I love places like it. Packed with ads and signs, these small, often immigrant-owned shops embody a certain resilience and grit, holding their ground as huge buildings and big businesses rise around them.”
Greater Toronto Area, Ontario (2012): “This construction site is somewhere in the GTA. The ambiguity of its location is intentional—everybody knows Toronto but not the municipalities around it.”
Sudbury, Ontario (2012): “I saw this mural and thought it ironic: we replaced nature with something artificial and called it paradise. Now, even that mural is gone.”
Kingston, Ontario (2013): “This is a cell inside Kingston Penitentiary. The inmate had clipped magazine photos of landscapes—probably his only source of escape. Elsewhere, I saw wall art that read: ‘No significant other. No career path. Entirely negative past. Nothing to contribute.’ ”
Fraser Valley, B.C. (2019): “I took this photo during an eight-day trip from Prince Rupert, B.C., to Toronto. I was on a tourist train here, and the conductor often stopped to let us get a closer look at bears we’d pass by. I loved the trip because I saw bits of Canada from a new vantage point, including the haunting views of the Fraser Valley and the seductive landscapes of Saskatchewan. Even the retro train cabin decor added to the charm.”